The Angoulême International Comics Festival has announced the three creators in line for its esteemed Grand Prix: Daniel Clowes, Catherine Meurisse and Posy Simmonds. Considered one of the highest of honours in the international comics circuit, 2024 appears to be a tight race.
The three names received the most votes from a ballot of registered comics professionals conducted between January 3 and 9. A second round of voting – between January 12 and 17 – will determine the Grand Prix recipient, which will be announced on the eve of the opening of the 2024 Angoulême Festival on January 24.
In a press release Angoulême Festival said:
“Since 2014, the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival has been awarded following a vote by professional comics authors. The first round of voting for the Grand Prix 2024 ended on Tuesday, January 9. The three artists [in alphabetical order] who received the most votes were: Daniel Clowes, Catherine Meurisse, Posy Simmonds”
Continuing the trend of recent years, women dominated the shortlisted candidates list after decades of being excluded. It is also an interesting international mix – with only one candidate this year being from France (Meurisse).
Catherine Meurisse (43) has been nominated for the third year in a row but she is definitely the junior when set beside the lengthy careers of America’s Daniel Clowes (62) and Britain’s Posy Simmonds (78). Will voters decide who wins based on lifetime achievement, national pride, or personal familiarity and preference? All is to play for.
The 2023 Grand Prix went to prolific French-Syrian The Arab of the Future and Esther’s Notebooks cartoonist Riad Sattouf – beating a ballot comprising Catherine Meurisse and Alison Bechdel. As part of the award, he is to receive a dedicated exhibition at this year’s festival, focused on his six-volume autobiographical opus The Arab of the Future.
Check out our bios of the 2024 Grand Prix candidates below.
DANIEL CLOWES
As the Angoulême press release states: “Daniel Clowes is one of the most prominent voices in North American comics, and a leading figure in the independent comics scene.” The 63-year-old cartoonist and illustrator emerged as part of the alternative side of the 1980s indie comics movement. He got his start producing comics under multiple pseudonyms in Cracked magazine before getting picked up by Fantagraphics. His first comic featuring his satirical detective Lloyd Llewellyn was a backup strip in the Hernandez’ Love and Rockets #13, in 1985. In 1989, Clowes introduced his 23-issue Eightball anthology through which he serialised his first five graphic novels including Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (Eightball #1-10, collected edition published 1993) and Ghost World (Eightball #11-18, collected edition 1997). Post-Eightball he forwent the serialised format and produced four critically acclaimed graphic novels. His most recent graphic novel was Monica (Fantagraphics, 2023). Three of his works have been adapted to the big screen – and he has produced the screenplays for each – first as a cowriter with director Terry Zwigoff for Ghost World (2001), then as sole screenwriter for Art School Confidential (2006) and Wilson (2017).
CATHERINE MEURISSE
Catherine Meurisse is little known in the anglophone market but she has built up significant acclaim as a cartoonist and illustrator in her native France. She is also the youngest of this year’s finalists for Grand Prix, at 43 years old, but this will be the third year in a row she has been nominated. A modern literature graduate from the University of Poitiers, she transitioned to art and illustration in Paris, first at the Estienne School and then at the National School of Decorative Arts. She was scouted by the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in 2001 and upon graduation (2005) she became an editorial cartoonist and illustrator for the paper – as well as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for multiple other French magazines. By 2014 she was still the only woman on the permanent editorial cartoonist team at Charlie Hebdo. Following the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks she abandoned political cartooning and focused her work on comics. Her first long form work during this period was La Légèreté (Lightness), published by Darguad in 2016, an autobiographical piece about her recovery from the trauma. She then explored her childhood with Les Grands Espaces (The Great Outdoors, Dargaud 2018); the life and friendship between the French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and novelist Alexandre Dumas in Delacroix (Dargaud, 2019); and produced a travelogue of her visits to Japan, La jeune femme et la mer (The Young Woman and the Sea; Dargaud, 2022). In 2020 Meurisse became the first woman cartoonist to be elected to the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts. Much of her work has been translated made available digitally through Europe Comics – with the most recent one Man and Superwoman – a collection of her pages for Philosophie Magazine from 2017-2022 (Humaine, trop humaine; Dargaud, 2022) – to be released on January 31, 2024.
POSY SIMMONDS
Posy Simmonds (78) is a national treasure to the UK comics scene and one of Britain’s first graphic novelists. She is a graduate of the Central School of Art and Design (today known as Central Saint Martins). Simmonds emerged as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist – producing satirical illustrations for The Times (of London), Cosmopolitan, Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf magazine, The Guardian, and The Spectator. From 1977 she started drawing weekly comic strips at The Guardian; while the strip was largely untitled it has latterly been referred to (and collected) as the Mrs Weber series, which was aimed at satirising the lives of the middle class. An early collection of a complete story featuring her recurring characters is considered her first graphic novel – True Love (Jonathan Cape, 1981). Her next graphic novel Gemma Bovary was a modern retelling of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) that was serialised in The Guardian and collected in 1999. Her third graphic novel, Tamara Drewe (Jonathan Cape, 1999), was the last to be serialised and was a modern retelling of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far From The Madding Crowd. Both Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe have been adapted into films. Her most recent graphic novel was 2018’s Cassandra Darke (Jonathan Cape). Since the late 1980s Simmonds has also produced illustrated children’s books, the first of which being Fred (1987) about the remarkable social life of a couple’s recently deceased cat. A multi-award winner and also well regarded in France, she currently has a major retrospective exhibition at the Paris Pompidou Centre running until April 1, 2024.
